Our eyes on the Southeast's ocean and coastal waters

Author: ruoyinghe

Matthew is a bizarre hurricane. It is moving slowly along the coastline with the potential for landfall anywhere from northeastern Florida to southeastern North Carolina, and landfall could happen multiple times. There is no other hurricane on record with a similar track!

Hurricane Matthew is expected to turn offshore after reaching North Carolina. This is because a high pressure system over the northern United States prevents the storm from moving further north.

Because of the approaching Hurricane Nicole, Matthew is predicted to loop back in almost a complete circle and affect Bahamas and the east coast of Florida again. It should be significantly weakened than the first round, because the temperature and heat content of the ocean where it passed over are significantly reduced, thus providing less “fuel” for Matthew to strengthen again.

Hurricane Matthew is on track to become the first major hurricane to make landfall on U.S. shores since Wilma in 2005. National Hurricane Center (NHC) predicted Matthew could make landfall in Florida early Friday as a Category 4 hurricane.At the same time, Nicole to its east was just upgraded to Category 1 hurricane (Figure 1).

This is a rare phenomenon and how exactly the two tropical cyclones will interact with one another is too early to tell. NHC predictions suggest Nicole will likely nudge Matthew back to Florida and Bahamas again in a loop-de-loop early next week (Figure 2). The underlying three-dimensional ocean conditions will play a key role throughout this process. Accurately resolving the dynamic ocean temperature field and the momentum, heat and moisture flux exchanges across the air-sea-wave interface is in particular crucial for hurricane intensity forecast.

Near-real time model validations against HF radar surface currents and buoy measurements have been implemented and continue to be refined in CNAPS (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Comparison between HF radar observed and CNAPS predicted surface current fields off Miami at 2100 EDT, October 5, 2016. CNAPS prediction shows that Matthew had a strong interaction with the northward flowing Gulf Stream and an energetic cyclonic surface current gyre was generated. (HF data courtesy: Nick Shay, University of Miami)

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The information and resources made available on this blog are SECOORA and SECOORA partner contributions. If you are making an decision based on this information, please heed your local emergency management and the NOAA's National Hurricane Center's official forecast and the National Weather Service announcements.